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The Gothic language, known from their bible translation and fragmentary evidence, is the only clearly attested member of what modern linguists designate as the East Germanic language family, because it was already distinct from the two Germanic families that have survived today, West Germanic and North Germanic, which were originally ...
A crucial source on Gothic history is the Getica of the 6th-century historian Jordanes, who may have been of Gothic descent. [ 31 ] [ 32 ] Jordanes claims to have based the Getica on an earlier lost work by Cassiodorus , but also cites material from fifteen other classical sources, including an otherwise unknown writer, Ablabius .
There were several origin stories of the Gothic peoples recorded by Latin and Greek authors in late antiquity (roughly 3rd–8th centuries AD), and these are relevant not only to the study of literature, but also to attempts to reconstruct the early history of the Goths, and other peoples mentioned in these stories.
The Gothic name is attested in Shapur I's famous trilingual inscription at Naqsh-e Rostam, which is dated to 262. [2] According to Shapur, "When first I was come to the imperial throne, Gordian Caesar (Gordian III) assembled a force of Goths and Germans from all of Rome and made an inroad into Assyria against the Aryan empire and us."
Imaginative portrait of Alaric in C. Strahlheim, Das Welttheater, 4.Band, Frankfurt a.M., 1836. According to Jordanes, a 6th-century Roman bureaucrat of Gothic origin—who later turned his hand to history—Alaric was born on Peuce Island at the mouth of the Danube Delta in present-day Romania and belonged to the noble Balti dynasty of the Thervingian Goths.
The name is derived from the Gothicists' belief that the Goths had originated from Sweden, based on Jordanes' account of a Gothic urheimat in Scandinavia ().The Gothicists took pride in the Gothic tradition that the Ostrogoths and their king Theodoric the Great, who assumed power in the Roman Empire, had Scandinavian ancestry.
The Visigoths were never called Visigoths, only Goths, until Cassiodorus used the term, when referring to their loss against Clovis I in 507. Cassiodorus apparently invented the term based on the model of the "Ostrogoths", but using the older name of the Vesi, one of the tribal names which the fifth-century poet Sidonius Apollinaris, had already used when referring to the Visigoths.
Gothic religion was purely tribal in which polytheism, nature worship, and ancestor worship were one and the same. It is known that the Amali dynasty deified their ancestors, the Ansis (cognate with Old English ēse , Old Norse æsir ), and that the Tervingi opened battle with songs of praise for their ancestors.